The backlog was always a credit card

An engineer putting a piece of work on their backlog is effectively deferring it to never. It's important enough to write it down somewhere and document that it exists as a bug or a feature enhancement, but it's not important enough to act. Yes, sometimes we ambitiously carve out time to "burn down the backlog", but do you know what we pick from that list? We pick the interesting work. Interesting…